TAKK Welcomes Visitors to MAXXI with a Wild and Wonderful Installation

With “Entrate,” curated by Martina Muzi, MAXXI has been making the most of its lobby by inviting architects to animate the space and truly draw visitors in. Last year, Nacho Carbonell devised an evocative setting in Rome’s Zaha Hadid—designed modern art museum with Memory, in practice. Taking the baton for the second edition is another Spanish practice: TAKK, founded by Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño in Barcelona, have conjured a fantastical ambience that is also deeply rooted in the here and now. The architecture duo’s Con-Vivere captures its namesake vibe of conviviality — proposing how we could and should live together as humans and in relationship with non-human species.

Two futuristic art installations are displayed in a modern gallery: one is a crown-like structure with lights, the other resembles a wheeled, illuminated vehicle with a spiked, circular frame.

Wicker egg chair decorated with faux fur, neon "WELCOME HOME" sign, flowers, and lit bulbs, set against a plain gray wall.

It begins with a crib-like oval welcome station crowned in lights and dripping with florals. Luzárraga and Muiño have made a point of refusing the Modernist notion that decoration is frivolous, and their installation abounds with the flourishes seen in some of their previous work, from flowers woven into surfaces to vegetables as nourishing, cleansing and beautifying interior elements.

“There has been a lot of discussion on ornament in architecture during modernism,” says Luzárraga. “The excuse was that ornament attracts dust and disease but there was also something behind that: The idea that ornament was more related to feminized labor and therefore has to be banned. So, we also like working with ornament and with techniques that are more associated with feminized labor — and with colors less associated with architecture.”

A group of people sit on a circular sofa around a central arrangement of plants and lights in a modern, minimalist interior with dark staircases.

Wooden structure on wheels with pink cushioning, supporting a central arrangement of colorful dried flowers, set against a concrete wall background with partial signage visible.

Two women sit and talk on a soft, fuzzy surface beneath a large art installation featuring dried flowers and wooden structures in a modern indoor space.

She points to the six-meter-diameter sofa — upholstered in pink faux fur — that beckons visitors to relax collectively and “do nothing;” we live in capitalism but we don’t always have to be productive. At its center hangs a voluminous floral bouquet with calming aromatic qualities.

A large, conical plant installation stands on wheeled wooden tables, surrounded by LED tube lights, with blue barrels on top, inside a modern, high-ceilinged gallery space.

A wooden structure holds multiple pots of green plants and fluorescent lights, set indoors near large windows with metal framework visible outside.

Three people sit at a circular wooden table beneath a large, plant-filled installation with fluorescent lights and industrial elements inside a modern indoor space.

Then there is the tower that supports various species of edible Mediterranean plants in a cascading planter system irrigated from above; when the bounty is ripe, there will be a banquet at the tables below. In this shared harvest, the contemporary clarion call for food sovereignty nestles up against ancient ways of living and doing.

In the “wellness bed,” meanwhile, rest is modulated by both fragrant vegetables and light therapy.

A large, wheeled metal structure with yellow wheels, a canopy framed by lights, speakers, and electrical components, set indoors on a smooth floor. Water is the sustaining life source. A fountain that TAKK refers to as “a water parliament” invites visitors to climb up for a jacuzzi experience. Like all the pieces in the installation, it’s playful but conveys a serious message: We are interconnected with the natural systems around us and every impact we make on them has a profoundly reverberative effect for all species. Luzárraga finds it encouraging that some waterways, like the rivers granted legal rights, now have political agency.

A white metal structure with stairs and mesh railings on wheels is displayed in a modern, minimalist interior with concrete walls and bright lighting.

A round indoor fountain installation with multiple water jets spraying upwards, surrounded by white railings and set against concrete walls in a modern space.

For the last Venice Biennale of Architecture, TAKK created Water Parliaments for the Catalan Pavilion. “We acknowledged the importance that water has to be understood not as a resource serving humans, but as a very complex body of relationships to many other bodies,” says Luzárraga. Next year, they will continue this dialogue in an installation about sediments for the World Congress of Architecture.

All of the installation’s settings are composed of lightweight structural systems set on wheels for flexibility. And they are faithful to the immaculately detailed drawings that TAKK began with. “We move from the computer to the construction, and it’s exactly the same — we draw it in the computer, we cut it exactly with the CNC milling machine, and then we assemble it.” While the result feels aesthetically whimsical, there is no improvisation here, except in some of the furniture finishes. This is a joyful and hopeful installation, but it’s also very serious.

A large, arched wooden structure with exposed bulbs and red wheels is displayed in a modern gallery with geometric wall art and large windows.

A large, abstract wooden sculpture with light bulbs and red wheels is displayed in a modern, minimalistic indoor space with geometric wall designs and black ceiling panels.
In fact, all of TAKK’s enchanting creations connect a critique of colonialism, modernism, capitalism and anthropocentrism to an embrace of feminist ethos and climate crisis urgency. “We are always working in this idea of how we should face this current crisis of climate change, through exploring cohabitation formats between us and the rest of the living entities of the planet,” says Luzárraga. “Not being anthropocentric but shifting away from this very human-centered, particularly a male-white-European-human perspective, in order to establish more democratic contracts between us and the rest of the living species of the planet that are also facing the sixth mass extinction.”

Photography courtesy José Hevia and MAXXI.

Elizabeth Pagliacolo is the Editor of Azure magazine and Executive Editor of Design Milk. Based in Toronto, she covers design at every scale, from the spoon to the city. Some of her favourite things, in no particular order, are Mulholland Drive (the movie and the place), burnt Basque cheesecake (preferably from Toronto’s Bar Raval), true crime podcasts (indiscriminately) and the sound of boots crunching down on fall leaves.

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